The latest U.N. report on conditions in Iraq confirmed the wisdom of the 17th century British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, a survivor of the bloody English civil wars of the 1640s, famously concluded that in the absence of any effective government, the life of human beings became "nasty, brutish and short." That, Hobbes concluded, was why even rule by a harsh tyranny was preferably to the chaos of struggling fo |